Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
For Playstation 2
Dark Alliance is a highly competent Diablo-like hack-and-slash roleplaying game for consoles, most importantly featuring the great fun of cooperative two player gaming.
The two player cooperation was actually a main reason Henrik and I got this game for his Playstation 2, good two player games that both of us like are more sparse than one might think. It's a pity really, because two people at once is definitely a lot more fun than taking turns.
For those of you (I know there are a few out there somewhere) associating Baldur's Gate with plot-heavy roleplaying Dark Alliance might feel quite a bit wrong. This is a Diablo in the Forgotten Realms, and skillfully adapted for console joypad control. Choose either a dwarven warrior (hi mom!), a human archer (hi Henrik!) or an elven sorceress and proceed to kill your way through droves of nice-looking monsters, picking up their stuff as you go. Munchkin is right, we all love it.
I said nice-looking monsters, and I mean it from a graphical standpoint. They all look good. Really good. The whole game does actually and everything (from rats to the framerate) moves smoothly too. Coolest of all, Dark Alliance is the first console game I've ever seen that uses full scene antialiasing. For the uninitiated, that means it does nice blending tricks that remove those jagged edges you can see on polygons in 3d games, giving everything a very much smoother look. I've been wondering why Xbox games don't do it all the time, and now that I've seen it work wonderfully on a PS2 I'm just wondering even more. FSAA to the people!
We picked up the game soley for playing cooperative, and that we did. Apart fron the tutorial (and a quick stab at the bonus Gauntlet level) we haven't even glanced at the single player game. So I have no idea what differences there are in monster and item amounts in single versus multi player, but things felt nicely balanced for two. Actually the final battle felt like the only exception, we won it on the second attempt and it was over with really fast. After that came a pre-rendered outro film, but the less said about that one the better :-) ...
I can imagine the game feeling a bit more challening and a bit different in single player though. If one player dies in two player mode all the surviving player needs to do is backtrack to the closest save point. Once there the other character is resurrected immediately and with no penalties whatsoever. If both die, however, it's time to reload from the last save. A lot of cheerful reckless assaults are likely skipped if you have to reload every time you die. The tension should be higher in single player, cooperative is just major fun :-) ...
Joking about the looks of the other character with or without different weapons and armour, taunting the monsters, going on about the unfairness in experience differences, dying simultaneously from one explosive barrel lite by accident, and much more, it just isn't the same in single player games. Cooperative modes rock, and I wish more games would have them.
There was only one thing we really missed in the cooperative mode, and that thing was the ability to pool or transfer money between the characters. Objects weren't a problem of course since you can always just drop them, but the money's stuck where it is. It might not seem like a huge deal at first, but later on when things start costing a bit we started wishing we could pool our money to get bigger stuff faster. To deal with it we started using my character for buying and selling everything, which was a perfectly managable way around the problem. Not perfect though ...